Over the past year I've OCR'd dozens of paper productions and we keep finding unreadable sections that cause missed ci…
Open Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Go to the Tools pane and select Recognize Text.
Click Recognize Text to open the recognize text options.
Select the option to recognize text in multiple files.
Adjust OCR language and output options as needed in the settings dialog.
CautionEnsure the correct OCR language is selected for best accuracy.
In the file selection dialog, add all the scanned PDF files you want to process.
Specify the output folder where processed files will be saved and click Recognize Text.
In the file selection dialog, add all the scanned PDF files you want to process and click Recognize Text.
Best practiceIf you have many files, organize them in a single folder to simplify batch selection.
Wait for Acrobat to process all files; review the output PDFs to confirm text has been recognized.
NoteProcessed files will be saved according to your output settings; check the destination folder.
You can reuse your custom batch OCR action any time by selecting it in the Action Wizard pane.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
The Action Wizard in Acrobat Pro is a feature that lets you record a series of steps to apply to one or many PDFs. It's very useful for repeated tasks because it saves you time. Instead of doing the same clicks and settings for each file, you create an 'action' once, and then Acrobat does all the work for you on many files automatically. This ensures all files are processed the same way every time.
If your Action Wizard fails to convert multiple PDFs to DOCX, first check the number of files you are processing. Action Wizard can slow down or fail if you try to convert too many files at once, especially over 100-200. Try breaking your batch into smaller groups. Also, ensure the source PDFs are not corrupted or password-protected in a way that prevents conversion. You can test a single file manually to see if the conversion works outside the action.
Action Wizard usually needs the Acrobat Pro application open to run. It does not have a built-in feature to run from the command line, which means you cannot start an action using only text commands in your computer's system. If you need to automate Action Wizard tasks without opening Acrobat Pro, you would typically need to use a special third-party plugin or another automation tool that can interact with the Acrobat application.
JavaScript steps in an Action Wizard can sometimes fail silently, meaning they do not show an error message even if they don't work. This can happen due to security settings in Acrobat that prevent certain scripts from running, or if the script itself has an error that Acrobat doesn't report. It's important to test any JavaScript steps carefully on a small set of files and check the output to make sure they are performing as expected, rather than assuming they are working.